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Plan for Chaos by John Wyndham

John Wyndham is best remembered as the creator of what one critic called "cosy catastrophes", stories in which worldwide disaster may strike but a few survivors offer hope that traditional British virtues of stiff-upper-lipped endurance and adaptability will build a new and better civilisation. So it seems curious that, in the late 1940s, at the very time he was writing The Day of the Triffids, this most English of science-fiction writers was also pinning his literary hopes on Plan for Chaos. This overwrought but enjoyable nonsense looks back to the pulp fiction of the US magazines to which Wyndham had contributed throughout the 1930s. The book opens in an unnamed American city in the 1970s where news photographer Johnny Farthing is investigating the deaths of several blonde women who all look strikingly alike. (He has a strong motive for doing so in that they also all look strikingly like his